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At Siggraph 2014, Microsoft Research has unveiled Hyperlapse, an ingenious algorithm that, believe it or not, will actually make you want to watch first-person GoPro footage of climbing, cycling, skiing, or whatever other sporting holiday your friend has recently returned home from. Hyperlapse scans through hours of video footage, reconstructs the physical path that you took in 3D, and then generates a super-smooth 10x-speed hyperlapse video that is immensely watchable (it’s a lot like a video game, in fact). Hyperlapse is far, far superior to other techniques that attempt to make GoPro footage watchable, such as video stabilization or time-lapse. And best yet, Microsoft is planning to release Hyperlapse as a Windows app.

Watch the video below — I guarantee it’ll be the coolest thing you see today.

As you’re probably aware, first-person perspective videos are very popular right now. This is mostly due to the massive success of GoPro, but lifecasting and cellphones with video recording capabilities have been around for a long time now too. In the future, of course, head-mounted displays like Google Glass will undoubtedly churn out a lot of first-person video as well.

The problem is, most of this footage is completely unwatchable. You, the shooter, might occasionally watch a few clips and reminisce — but the idea of sitting down and actually watching your entire holiday again, in real time, is daunting. If you have the time and skill (most people don”t), you could edit the footage into a series of fun clips. You is also easy-to-use software that’ll simply speed your footage up, which makes it a little less daunting — but the shakiness of the footage makes for a pretty unpleasant viewing experience. And thus, Microsoft Research looked for another solution.

The gray envelopes are frames from the video. The red line is the smoothed path through the video. The gray dots are a 3D point cloud of the environment (generated by analyzing the relative location of objects/scenery in each frame).

If you’ve seen Photosynth before, Hyperlapse is actually very similar (and indeed, Microsoft researchers Johannes Kopf and Richard Szeliski were members of both projects). In short, Hyperlapse uses some very clever algorithms to create a 3D map of the world by analyzing the individual frames from the video. From this 3D map, Hyperlapse can work out the path that you (your camera) took through the world — and then it smooths the path to get rid of all the small, jerky movements.

That’s not all, though. The main reason that Hyperlapse footage looks so smooth is that the software actually recreates every single frame. Hyperlapse actually uses parts of each still frame to texture a 3D map. This is why, as you watch the videos, you’ll notice that textures change and pop in — much like walking around a 3D game. For more technical details on how Hyperlapse works, watch the video below. There are some more Hyperlapse videos on the Microsoft Research project page.

As you may have guessed, the immense awesomeness of Hyperlapse comes at a cost, however — namely, processing time. In the research paper, it says it took upwards of 300 hours to process a 10-minute input video. Kopf says they’ve since managed to get it down to a couple of hours for a 10-minute input video (on a normal desktop PC). Obviously, we’re still talking days or weeks of processing time if you want to make a hyperlapse of hours of holiday GoPro footage. It will speed up over time, though, as the algorithm improves.

The Hyperlapse team says they’re working hard on releasing the algorithm as a Windows app. This will probably just be a rough app that uses your own computer to do the processing — but if it’s popular, perhaps processing time could be significantly sped up by leveraging Microsoft’s Azure cloud cluster.

it would be really cool if you this could be used in edited videos so these hyperspeed will be used between the funny parts and slowly speed up and down. it will be fun to see some videos made with it.

maybe in a later version you could select some content that has to be in the hyperspeed like the hands of the climbing person makes it look more realistic.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Yeah, indeed. I don’t think the tech would allow for that in its current form. But if you had some video editing software… and you could mark the bits that you want to “Hyperlapse”… should be fairly easy.

chojin999

The example videos don’t look that good at all. The resulting video is worse than other “naive” algorithms.

massau

could you give some examples of those other algorithms? the naive just means pick every Nth frame.

AdamRadzik22

Yeah I’m wondering as well.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

This is Chojin, guys. He’s just trolling.

massau

ow yea now I remember its the guy who gives a link of an article and then quotes the full article instead of the important part to make his argument valid.

Dozerman

Whyyy sooo serious

YouNeed2BlackupSir

Quiet, you turd.

Dozerman

Man, Photosynth; that used to actually be a hobby of mine back in the day. SFM is legitimately fun if you have good subjects… too bad MS killed it off and the only two alternatives are Bundler SFM and Autodesk 123d catch.

eonvee375

i bet this how flash sees the world ^^

Pooua

This is entertaining, and that’s probably mostly what this technology would be used for; entertainment. However, extracting important information from a video stream is a critical research subject now. The most pressing situation I face in this subject is indexing video streams so the user can quickly find the specific content desired. Specifically, I shoot video of all my college classes that I’m taking as a student. That’s OK, but I need some way to find specific pieces of information within the one-to-four-hour lectures. Currently, I make notes in a notebook of the minute mark on the video at which the professor addresses a topic, but I would like to find a way for a computer to do that automatically. I think that would be a difficult challenge to solve, at least without some cooperation from the professor.

Dozerman

Speech recognition

Zunalter

Never has a bike ride that by some stranger in some place I don’t know been so interesting.

knightmike

Very cool.

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